Cookies considered harmful?

Michael Muchmore does a very good job of outlining the emerging “do not track” initiatives now being considered by the Mozilla folks, Microsoft, the advertising industry, and others in today’s PCMag article “Mozilla Contemplates ‘Do Not Track’ Feature for Firefox.” Unfortunately, everyone is looking at this the wrong way.

Let me summarize: Cookies are bad. Tracking on the Internet is bad. The ability for a website to track your activity is bad. The fact that browsers allow cookies is bad. The fact that your computer is a document of all your personal activity is bad. Do I make myself clear on this?

This whole scene stinks and to be nit-picking about how the next iteration of it will work is admitting defeat.

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I don’t completely agree with him, but I don’t completely disagree, either.

In any event, when I went to read the article, intellitxt.com and 2o7.com both tried to put cookies on my machine, as well as a coupl’a ad servers. Hey John Dvorak: eat your own dog food!